Map of the Western U.S. denoting the California, Mormon, Santa Fe, Spanish, and Oregon Trails ~ psdhook

Map of the Western U.S. denoting the California, Mormon, Santa Fe, Spanish, and Oregon Trails

IMAGE Details FOR Map of the Western U.S. denoting the California, Mormon, Santa Fe, Spanish, and Oregon Trails 's IMAGEThe map above is a political map of the world centered on Europe and Africa. It shows the location of most of the world's countries and includes their names where space allows.Representing a round earth on a flat map requires some distortion of the geographic features no matter how the map is done. We have used a Mercator projection for this map because it is the projection most commonly used in schools. On this map, geographic boundaries that trend north-south appear as vertical lines, geographic boundaries that trend east-west appear as horizontal lines. This type of projection causes a minimum of country-shape distortion near the equator, a small amount of distortion at mid-latitudes, but extreme distortion near the poles. For that reason, the map does not extend to the north and south poles.